Tea Party Nation's Toxic Response to The Boston Marathon Bombing

If bookies in Las Vegas, who set the odds on just about any and everything, had set odds on which Tea Party leader would be the first out of the gate with the most intemperate, uncontrolled and toxic take on the Boston Marathon bombing, Judson Phillips’ Tea Party Nationwould certainly have been better than even money.

In an email to members -- and in an article posted on the Tea Party Nation website -- Phillips blamed President Obama for the Boston Marathon bombing maintaining that it occurred because “we have a government that is not committed to protecting America” since it isn’t willing to “destroy radical Islam.”

People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch reported that “Phillips said that ‘Radical Islam and perhaps even non-radical Islam’ is a danger to western civilization, arguing that Muslims believe that ‘non-Islamic nations may be conquered or otherwise taken over.’”

The Franklin, Tennessee-based Tea Party Nation, which was organized by Phillips, a Nashville attorney, and his wife Sherry, describes itself as a “user-driven group of like-minded people who desire our God given Individual Freedoms which were written out by the Founding Fathers. We believe in Limited Government, Free Speech, the 2nd Amendment, our Military, Secure Borders and our Country!”

According to Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Size, Scope, and Focus of the Tea Party Movement, a report by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, in 2010, Tea Party Nation was the “third largest national Tea Party network, with 31,402 online members“ with “the largest concentration of members … in [the] group’s home state” and “sizable membership clusters in the Northeast, in Texas, Florida, Illinois, California, and Nevada.”

In his short tenure atop TPN, Phillips has been down the shameful and contemptible road many times. In a February email to members according to Right Wing Watch, Phillips called the National Jewish Democratic Council “a Nazi group that, like other liberals, is ‘in love with totalitarian regimes’ such as Hitler’s Germany.

In January, a few days before President Obama’s inauguration, Phillips warned supporters that “Barack Obama wants to destroy America,” maintaining that Obama is “disarming America” because he “believes America is the focus of evil in the modern world.”

And after the Sandy Hook massacre, Phillips called teachers’ unions a “focus of evil” since they’ve turned schools into a “target rich environments for some lunatic or terrorist,” and he urged the government to ban unions and “break up the public school system.”

Unfortunately the sad truth is we will be hit again. It will happen sooner or later. It will probably be sooner than later.

There are two reasons why we will be hit again. First, we have a determined enemy who hates us. Second, we have a government that is not committed to protecting America.

It is a pretty safe bet right now that this attack was carried out by an Islamist. It was a well-coordinated attack. In its publication, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula called for just this kind of attack.

While the government and media have fallen all over themselves to downplay this fact, there is a twenty-year-old Saudi student being detained as a “person of interest.” Person of interest in a nice police term that is used for someone who is not under arrest and therefore does not have to be read his Miranda rights and who hopefully will not lawyer up.

Barack Obama could not force himself to use the word “terrorism” in his speech last night and the FBI right now won’t call this a terrorist incident.

….The reason we will be hit again is because our government is not committed to destroying our enemy. Radical Islam is our enemy.

Some in the far end of the Liberty Movement will start screaming about war mongering “Neo-cons.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

….We need to first recognize our enemy and then come up with a strategy to destroy them. This is an ideological war. While sometimes that will mean guns and bombs, neither will destroy an ideology.

The values of the west, most of them good, some of them not so good are what will destroy radical Islam. In the west, we fall all over ourselves not to insult Islam.

Why?

We can go down the list of things Islam has done to the west. During the height of the Cold War, the Soviets came up with something called the Brezhnev doctrine. It said, “What’s ours is ours. What is yours is negotiable.” Radical Islam and perhaps even non-radical Islam holds to the same belief.

They believe that once a nation becomes Islamic it cannot have Islam removed from it. However, non-Islamic nations may be conquered or otherwise taken over.

Reagan knew that America had to stand up to the Communist threat. Bill Clinton wanted to ignore the Islamist threat. George W. Bush just wanted to hold the hand of the Saudi king and Barack Obama just wants to bow to him. As we mourn the victims of Boston, we need to make a solemn vow that we will not allow this to happen again.

The only way we make sure this never happens again is to identify our enemy and then craft a strategy to totally defeat that enemy.

In a BuzzFlash story posted January 11, 2011, the headline posed this question: “Is Judson Phillips, Founder of Tea Party Nation, In Danger of Becoming the Fred Phelps of the Movement?” At the time I was responding to an off-the-wall email Phillips sent to supporters after the attempted assassination of Arizona Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and the murder of six people and the wounding of a number of others.

In the email, Phillips claimed that Loughner was "a leftist lunatic" and that Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was a "leftist sheriff" who "was one of the first to start in on the liberal attack," that aimed to “silence “the Tea Party movement by blaming us for this."

I concluded that while Phillips was a controversial figure, often uttering statements that were false, vile and vicious, he had “not morphed into Fred Phelps,” the crazed virulently anti-gay cult leader of the Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, as “the differences between them remain profound.”

These days, the daylight between the Phelps and Phillips is getting slimmer all the time.